This detailed and authoritative volume changes our conceptions of "imperial" and "African" history. Frederick Cooper gathers a vast range of archival sources in French and English to achieve a truly comparative study of colonial policy towards the recruitment, control, institutionalization of African labor forces from the mid-1930s, when the labor question was first posed, to the late 1950s, when decolonization was well under way.

Professor Cooper explores colonial conceptions of the African worker, and shows how African trade union and political leaders used the new language of social change to claim equal wages, equal benefits, and share of power. This helped to persuade European officials that their post-war project of building a "modern" Africa within the colonial system was both unaffordable and politically impossible.

France and Great Britain left the continent, insisting the they had made it possible for Africans to organize wage labor and urban life in the image of industrial societies while abdicating to African elites responsibility for the consequences of the colonial intervention.

They left behind the question of how much the new language for discussing social policy corresponded to the lived experience of African workers and their families and how much room for maneuver Africans in government or in social movements had to recognize work, family, and community in their own ways.